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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

I just can't wrap my head around tiling WMs (and I've been doing Linux since a _long_ time ago). I just don't see how usable they can be when you have a "small" screen to be honest.

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That's cool, homie, maybe it's just not for you. Personally, while I understand the appeal, it's just not for me.

Frankly, mate, the answer is a bit too hipsterish. Of "you won't understand true underground anyway" sort. We're talking about productivity tools, if there are advantages they can be described even if subjectively.

Sometimes people just like things. It's not all about productivity.

I use Niri at home and PaperWM at work but I use most apps maximized. The thing that I like is that I can move between windows in a WASD like shortcut, more convenient that doing Alt-Tab. However vertical split is also very easy to do in Niri and it's sometimes very convenient.

But keyboard-driven workflow is not a property of tiling WMs. You can re-configure window switching in many WMs to be whatever you like

Lots of tasks involve two different apps (googling a bug while looking at the error, reading a spec while working on the code, being on a call while showing off a document etc). I'm almost always happier with two full monitors, but I use tiling when I'm stuck on a single laptop screen for example. I rarely want more than two things at once unless I'm in Emacs, and I sometimes get the sense that a lot of tiling window manager and tmux use is just people not knowing how to use their editor's built in window management and multi-process support. Obviously everyone's free to build their own environment however they like, I don't know why anyone would accept being stuck on a tiny screen for long periods though!

Vice versa for me: I cannot understand how people with small screens can use anything but tiling.

Tilers can remove Gnome's overly whitespaced decorations, probably saving 10% in screen pixels alone.

If you want to maximize all windows on run, niri can do that with a rule. It then becomes like a monocle layout where you can use swipes/keyboard/scroll wheel to navigate between maximized windows. I don't know of any DE that will run all windows maximized by default.

Too bad I no longer have an 800x600 netbook. Niri would be perfect for it.

More often than not you keep just one or two windows visible in the screen, and switch to another app with <super>+<number> or similar. Since you use most apps fullscreen, the small screen doesn't feel so small anymore. Feels good, honestly

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